The Venture Capitalist’s Guide to Content Marketing Strategy

Venture Capitalists See Content Across Companies

Kyle Lacy is the Head of Marketing Strategy at OpenView Partners, a venture capital (VC) firm. Before joining OpenView, Kyle led the global content marketing team for ExactTarget and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. He is also the author of “Twitter Marketing for Dummies,” “Branding Yourself,” and “Social CRM for Dummies.”

Kyle’s time at OpenView is split about 50/50 between OpenView’s brand (events, website, content) and consulting with their portfolio. On OpenView’s content platform, OpenView Labs, their guest and internal writers create content for practitioners as well as thought leaders. (Kyle also writes for Convince & Convert!) They work to create content from the top down and bottom up.

VCs like OpenView learn a lot from working with multiple companies at the same time. Kyle notes that this means you can develop processes that can be replicated, whether it’s a go-to market strategy, pricing strategy, or content strategy.

In This Episode

• What kind of content venture capitalists are writing
• How important content marketing is to the success of the businesses VCs invest in
• The goals and model of the OpenView Lab content platform
• Top trends in content marketing today
• The importance of buyer personas and actually using them to target content
• Keys to becoming a thought leader outside the blog (speaking and presenting)

Quotes From This Episode

“Content is a part of every single piece of a business. If you can’t tell that story the right way to the person you need to tell it to, to that persona, then you’re not going to be as successful as businesses that can do it really well.” —Kyle Lacy

“We’ve seen a massive uptick in investment in content because people are starting to realize that that’s what sets you apart. That’s what makes you unique is the story that you tell. It’s a part of every business, so it’s extremely important.” —@kyleplacy

“Content is really just teaching.” —@randyfrisch (highlight to tweet)

“Done is better than perfect. I think that people think so much about buyer personas that they just don’t ever do it because they’re just too busy doing just random campaigns or one-off projects.” —@kyleplacy

“It’s easy to talk about buyer personas. I think a lot of people talk about it, but not a lot of people do it.” —@kyleplacy

“Future marketing is definitely using data for personalization.” —@kyleplacy (highlight to tweet)

“The person that’s going to download your thought leadership report might not be the person making the final decision, or vice versa, on the software. So you have to understand what different points in the journey are happening, and then who are the people that are looking at the content to push to the end goal.” —@kyleplacy

“There are processes that you can apply to anything that—if done over the course of time—can work.” —@kyleplacy (highlight to tweet)

Resources

• Kyle’s website
• OpenView Partners, where Kyle is the Head of Marketing Strategy
• OpenView Labs, OpenView’s content platform
• Kyle’s books
• Growth.in, location-specific content site for the tech scene
• “Gettysburg,” the movie Kyle was obsessed with as a kid

What did you want to be when you grew up?

“Early on in my life, I wanted to be a Civil War reenactor, which is really odd.” Kyle was obsessed. He’s seen the movie “Gettysburg” about 65 times. “I basically wanted to be Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee in ‘Gettysburg.’ I had the entire Union suit. I had to buy a drum—I was too young to own a musket, so I had a drum for a drummer boy.”

Moving into high school and college, he was more into music business and recording studios before he got into marketing. “But my heart still lives within that 1855 to 1865 time frame.”